Ongoing projects

SCALINGS (Scaling up Co-creation: Avenues and Limits for Integrating Society in Science and Innovation) (2018–2021, Horizon2020)

A new Horizon2020 project was granted in the topic “Integrating Society in Science and Innovation – An approach to co-creation”. The project, SCALINGS (Scaling up Co-creation: Avenues and Limits for Integrating Society in Science and Innovation), addresses the challenge of mainstreaming co-creation across a diverse Europe head-on.SCALINGS Project summary: In the first ever rigorous comparative study on this topic, we will investigate the implementation, uptake, and outcomes of three co-creation instruments (public procurement of innovation, co-creation facilities, and living labs) in two technical domains (robotics and urban energy) across 10 countries. Using comparative case studies and coordinated cross-country experiments, we explore if and how these instruments can be generalized, transferred, or scaled up to new socio-cultural, economic, or institutional conditions to unleash their innovative power. Based on this unique data set, we will develop two new transformative frameworks – “situated co-creation” and “socially robust scaling” – to guide the wider dissemination of co-creation. We will synthesize our findings into an “EU Policy Roadmap” to support ongoing EU innovation policy efforts. Empirically, SCALINGS is closely integrated with over two dozen European co-creation initiatives that deal with cross-cultural transferability on a daily basis. Together with these partners, we will co-create enhanced practices that feed directly back into their work and strategy. Finally, we will launch a training program (boot camp) on co-creation in diverse settings for other EU consortia.TU/e’s input in the overall project: TU/e will collect empirical results for the Dutch cases and will focus on the ethical aspects of co-creation. The general questions are: 1. How can co-creation be understood in the light of Value Sensitive Design? 2. How should typical challenges of value sensitive design (different roles of stakeholders, universality of values, ethical commitments of methodology, measurement of values, …) be treated in a project on co-creation and responsible research and innovation. 3. Which socio-economic conditions are supportive for co-creation practices? 4. How can the local co-creation methods be generalized, transferred, or scaled up to new socio-cultural, economic, or institutional conditions?

The introduction of advanced robotics in logistics significantly affects quality of work and workers’ competence profiles. The fear that robotization will strip all motivating aspects from jobs is widespread and may lead to worker resistance. Successfully addressing these ‘human’ issues requires an interdisciplinary approach. This project aims to answer the question of how robotization in logistic warehouses can be utilized and developed in a way that does not conflict with workers’ sense of meaning in work and general well being. We hypothesize that this is best achieved when workers retain a sense of ‘ownership’ (i.e., control and responsibility) in their work, understand the aims of introducing robots and their functioning, and have a sense of working ‘with’ instead of ‘under’ or ‘against’, robots.

We will combine analysis of leading theoretical frameworks on meaningfulness and well-being from ethics and psychology with empirical data collection (i.e., job analyses, interviews and questionnaires) among employees in robotized warehouses from three different organizations. The project aims at delivering a theoretical framework of key social/human factors that have to be taken into account in the implementation and operation of robotics in warehouses, and a practical roadmap to chart and monitor these factors. Both will be presented and explained to the organizations participating in our research through an interactive seminar.

Overall logistics of refugees is problematic, because they are not nicely distributed over time, capacity to host them at fixed places is limited and procedures to either grant them a status or send them back have unknown length. Calculating an optimal logistics procedure is very difficult. In general there are three elements that are important in logistic processes: efficiency, robustness and flexibility. Finding optimal procedures usually is about optimizing the efficiency. However, for refugee logistics flexibility (being able to cope with varying sizes of refugee streams, changing places, length of stay) and robustness (when refugee camps are closed or other means of support are suddenly unavailable) are very influential. Thus we need to find ways to preserve as much efficiency while being flexible and robust. This project will approach this problem through an agent-based approach in which agents represent the different stakeholders and support organizations in the process. This approach of modelling should give right to the different perspectives, rights, concerns and values of each stakeholder. Value sensitive design will be used to integrate these issues of ethical importance in a systematic way into the logistic model. Simulations can be made that can serve in two ways. Firstly, they can be used to simulate different scenarios and indicate where bottle necks might appear and where they come from. Secondly, to serve as a means of communication between the stakeholders showing them the concerns of other stakeholders and what are possible solutions involving the cooperation of several parties.

The rapid development of mobile devices and social media opens up tremendous opportunities for support systems that promote a healthier lifestyle by helping to change the user’s behavior. These systems have an enormous potential for preventing chronic illnesses and reducing healthcare costs. They are also becoming increasingly personalized. As data gathered on individual behavior patterns increase in depth and breadth, opportunities arise for more personally tailored solutions for behavior change – including solutions tailored to personal habits, social, and physical contexts, time variant events, and physiological patterns. However, widespread adoption of apps for health self-management remains low. In this study we address three key issues that are crucial for the success of mobile support systems for health behavior: trust, consent, and intrinsic motivation. Mobile technologies are “nebulous” in the sense that they involve both a “cloud” of data and a set of physical devices, their effects are often unpredictable, and the underlying decision mechanisms by which they achieve their effects are opaque to users. This makes it difficult to trust them and to consent to their use. We aim to develop new ways in which users can trust nebulous mobile systems and a new model to consent to their use. We also address an important concern with these systems: that they may change the intrinsic motivation for healthy behavior to a less powerful extrinsic motivation based on external rewards. These topics are studied in an interdisciplinary way, using expertise from ethics, psychology and artificial intelligence/cognitive science.

Fearful Technologies: Historical and ethical perspectives on the role of fear in pro-technology discourses (2017-2021, IE&IS strategic area funding)

Fears of technologies are a prominent research topic in Science and Technology Studies and Risk Research. Industry, academia, and policy makers have been eager to develop strategies to overcome such fears. An area that has, however, been neglected so far is the question how the promotion of new technologies has itself appealed to fears. To name only a few examples: The fear that ‘the lights could go out’ has been addressed continuously in the promotion of nuclear energy; the fear that one could miss out on the meaning of life is stressed in the promotion of in-vitro-fertilization; and the fear that the world’s knowledge could get lost is emphasized in the calls for digital archives.

The project will therefore investigate the argumentative role of fear in pro-technology discourses and the effects of these appeals to fear. It will bring together research from history and ethics of technology. The main research question will be: Which role did and do emotions, and especially fear play (historically) in the pro-technology discourse of emerging technologies and how should these appeals to fear be evaluated from an ethical perspective? We will investigate this question on the basis of empirical case studies and in relation to the ethical debate on the role of emotions and fear in technology acceptance.

Lifestyle diseases, chronic illness, and an aging population pose significant societal burdens. Symptoms and severity of chronic illness, often common in old age, can be reduced through greater adherence to medications and lifestyle changes. In addition, intervening in the health-related behaviors of children has the potential to reduce the long-term burden of disease, increase life quality, and reduce healthcare costs. Technologies for behavior change (TBCs) are already being developed for prevention and lifestyle change, such as smartphone apps to analyze and quantify sleep patterns, diet, exercise, stress, and disease management. However, research on the psychological and ethical implications of these technologies for vulnerable populations, e.g. children or the elderly, is limited. There is a need to identify and counter the unintended psychological effects of constant tracking, privacy-risks, social pressures, and misleading data visualizations. Values are embedded in designs, e.g. a paternalistic stance that “forces” people into certain behaviors. To protect and respect users, there is a need for an assessment of ethical dilemmas related to paternalism and autonomy and ethical guidelines tailored to different persuasive strategies. After a philosophical analysis and empirical study of TBCs, the final goal is to develop an ethical design framework based on the results of the preceding analyses adapting Value Sensitive Design (Friedman et al., 2013) specifically to TBC.

The goal of this project is to develop a framework for analyzing the value trade-offs associated with rendering cloud-based big data sets interoperable for the sake of public safety. This framework will help stakeholders identify the specific technical and ethical (particularly privacy and security) challenges and constraints to anticipate during system design and implementation, and will help identify different types of value and the variety of adverse social and ethical consequences (especially related to fairness and justice) that may result from implementing interoperability in public safety contexts. The framework produced will provide input for interoperable information system design and specification.

India faces two major challenges in the field of electricity generation and use. Its electricity demand is growing while its central grid suffers from severe performance deficits. Meanwhile, a significant part of India’s population does not even have access to the central grid. The Indian government aims to address these challenges in part by using smart grids, energy networks that use ICT to match supply and demand from multiple sources. However, successful smart grid development is not simply a matter of getting the technology right: social embedding, ethical acceptability and institutional support are at least as important. This project therefore sets out to answer the question: How can smart grids be successfully developed and implemented in rural India?

The project’s work is divided into five work packages (WPs). WP1 investigates technical specifications and develops a smart grid prototype. WP2 investigates how smart grids can be embedded and commercialized in the rural Indian energy market, using the Hidden Design method. WP3 investigates how societal and institutional factors affect the viability of smart grid implementation and use in India, using an ethnographic approach in combination with insights from transition studies. WP4 addresses ethical challenges, especially the question to what degree hidden design can replace deliberative processes as a fair and just method of stakeholder involvement. WP5 investigates which key factors affect the potential for upscaling smart grids throughout India. Goal of the project is to answer the research question by the actual responsible development and implementation of a smart grid prototype.

Darwinizing culture: the status of cultural evolutionary theory as a science (2014-2019, NWO-Vidi)

The last couple of decades has witnessed a surge of attempts to Darwinize the cultural sciences. By applying biological theories and tools to cultural phenomena (e.g., cultural diversity, cultural revolutions), cultural evolutionists purport to make the study of culture a more progressive and more rigorous enterprise. Although their work has caught on astonishingly rapidly, and although it has faced several in principle objections, it hasn’t yet been subjected to thorough methodological criticism. In that light, exploiting the tools provided by the philosophy of science, the VIDI programme aims to answer the following question: To what extent can we trust methods devised for understanding biological phenomena, if these are applied to the realm of culture?